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Galen Ohmart Architect
When you work closely with someone
for 20 years as business partner and professional collaborator, you cannot help
but contribute to each other’s creative output.
Galen and I were mutually dependent on each other for our livelihood
though not our hobbies. Yet being one’s
business partner is a unique intimate relationship. We were each other’s creative mentors as well
as foils. Today, I’d like to share with
you some of that creative output that was Galen the architect – at least
through the filter of my experience.
One of my mentors, prior to my
partnership with Galen, would often say, “The only thing that is certain, is
that we will live on in the creativity that we engender in others.” For a creative design architect – and Galen
was that – one can live on in the buildings that he or she has designed and
that have been built.
For me, the qualities that stand
out in Galen’s life as an architect are his practicality, his flexibility, his
ability to do mor…

It may seem counter-intuitive for an energy modeling
consultant to suggest that the real
value proposition for energy modeling is not
energy performance accounting. But that
is what I am suggesting. The most
significant value proposition for energy modeling is: The Use of Modeling to
Inform the Integrated Design of a High Performance Building from Start to
Completion
This is my goal for all energy modeling and all
projects. It is also the motivation
behind my efforts to encourage market-wide development of sophisticated
modeling capabilities. Energy modeling is an extremely powerful design tool,
when applied by the right practitioner.
A good model calculates heating and cooling loads for every hour of the
year in every zone within a building design.
Further, it disaggregates loads into contributing components and allows
detailed loads analysis associated with each building component (windows,
walls, lighting, infiltration, etc.) If
we accept that in order to achieve exceptional …